Stan Rafferty pulled up to the full-service pumps at the Shell station across the road from the brightly lit Exxon plaza where the blue pool truck was gassing up.
He tapped on his horn, but nobody came out of the office. Red-and-green plastic flags rattled in the breeze. In the grass beside the building, there were half a dozen chickens pecking at the dirt where someone had sprinkled corn or seed or some shit. Probably a litter of pigs living in the rest room and a cow grazing back in the weedy shadows.
That’s the way it was in Florida. You got a mile outside of Miami, you might as well be in Fart Blossom, Georgia, or some little Alabama shithole. Every radio station for the last eighteen hours had been playing twangy you-done-me-wrong songs, or else some idiot preacher was throwing his thunderbolts out into the sinful darkness of radio land.
Stan backed the car up and ran over the air hose again, chiming the bell somewhere nearby. It took two more taps on his horn before a pale, red-haired three-hundred-pounder threw open the door of the fluorescent office and came lumbering over to Stan’s open window. Every step a seismic event.
The guy’s left cheek was bulging and a brown dribble showed in the corner of his mouth. Probably been inside the station all night gawking at the pinups in the new issue of Barnyard Monthly, Stan thought.
Stan took the last sip out of the quart of Colt 45 and dropped the bottle on the passenger floor. He’d drunk three quarts, had four more getting warm in the back seat. He’d bought them at the last gas stop. Painkillers for the damn ache in his leg. They were only halfway working.
The big redneck came up to Stan’s window, bent down to look him over, then said, “Don’t do no full service after seven P.M. Gotta pump it yourself.”
Stan looked at the dashboard digital clock.
“It’s only six-fifty.”
“’At’s not what my watch says. And my watch is what we go by around here.”
The big man was wearing a railroad cap and overalls and an orange T-shirt that was giving Stan an instant headache.
“Jesus Christ, man, I’ve got a broken leg,” Stan said, tapping on the white plaster. “I’m in a goddamn cast. Cut me a little slack, why don’t you?”
The big man stepped away from the window.
“Don’t be cussing me, mister. Rules is rules.”
The man started back to his office.
“Hey!” Stan yelled. “Hey, you porker. Look at me. Turn around, doofus, and look me in the fucking eye.”
With his back to Stan, the man halted, shot a thick dollop of tobacco juice into the weeds beside the pumps, and turned slowly. His mouth was set in a snarl, but when he saw the .38 pointing at him out the window, his face went slack.
“You know who I am, pig man?”
“Don’t reckon I do.”
“I’m Machine Gun Kelly is who I am. I’m Richard Loeb and Alferd Packer and Lee Harvey Oswald all rolled up in one. I’m Charles Starkweather and Frank Nitti and Joseph Michael Valachi.”
“You’re all those people, are you?”
“You bet your sweet ass I am. Them and more.”
“If you say so.”
“So fill it up, fat boy,” Stan said. “Regular unleaded.”
While the guy pumped the gas, Stan kept one eye on him in the rearview mirror and the other eye on the blue pool truck across the highway. Jennifer and the dark girl had gotten out and gone off to the john together while the water buffalo who’d been driving the truck was filling the tank. Stan just got a glimpse of the two women together, but he didn’t like what he saw. Reading their body language, it didn’t look like Jennifer was a hostage at all. Way too friendly. A couple of girls out for a Sunday ride, kidding around, playful.
For close to six hundred miles now, Stan had been following them. Never saw anyone drive so slowly. A hundred times, he’d considered passing them by, speeding on ahead, getting to Seaside a few hours before they did. But things could go wrong with that. He could have car trouble. They could pass him, get there first. This way, at least he could keep them in sight, and maybe, if the opportunity arose, ambush them somewhere along the way.
He’d always hated that white Galaxy, but now he’d begun to appreciate the car because it was so damn bland, it was practically invisible. Even with no traffic to speak of for the last few hours, the three of them didn’t have a clue he was back there. Just another boxy white car.
“You’re full up,” the porker called.
Stan looked over at the pump, then pulled out his wallet and counted out seventeen dollars and held them out to the man, but the big guy eyed the money suspiciously
and backed away.
“Take it,” Stan said. “This isn’t a fucking holdup.”
“It’s not?”
“No, you idiot. I just wanted full service. That’s all.”
“We don’t do no full service after seven P.M.,” the porker said.
“Yeah, so I heard.”
Stan waggled the money at the man until he leaned over and snatched it out of Stan’s grasp.
By then, the pool-service truck was pulling out of the Exxon plaza and cranking back up the highway.
“Before I go,” Stan said, and showed him the gun again, “I want you to swallow that plug.”
“Say what?”
“That chewing tobacco, swallow it.” Stan sighted on the man’s broad, smooth forehead. “The whole damn mess, gulp it right on down.”
Stan thumbed the hammer back.
“Shit,” the man said. “It’s too got-damn big to swallow.”
“No cussing. Just swallow it down, you oinker. The whole thing. Hurry up. I gotta go. Do it or I’ll shoot your measly pecker off.”
With his eyes on the gun, the porker craned his neck and took a quick breath, then choked down the wad.
“That stuff’ll kill you, boy, if you aren’t careful. Give you mouth cancer and kill you deader than a bullet through the heart.”
Stan uncocked the pistol, put the car in gear, and rolled onto the highway.
When he looked back, the porker was bent over the grass, vomiting, and a couple of the chickens were scurrying over to feed.
Stan kept the pickup’s taillights in sight as they cut
north through the dark Florida night. Mile after mile spooling out in front of him. He left the radio off for a while. Went inside his head, snuffling around, looking for something to amuse himself with for the next few miles.
Long ago, he’d used up the five women he’d had sex with. Having trouble falling asleep or sitting in the dentist’s office, sick of reading magazines, a thousand times he’d gone over and over every single moment he could recall with those five females, every act, every part of their bodies he could still remember. Size and shape of their nipples, the coarseness of their pubic hair. Their smell, tightness. Everything.
Of course, it wasn’t much of a list. Subtract Jennifer and Alexandra, there were only those two cheerleaders back in the eleventh grade who’d given him a few blow jobs and spread their legs for a couple of listless fucks on the back seat of his yellow Dodge Dart.
And then there was his sister, Margie.
Just that once with her, and only because she’d wanted him to do it, so she’d know what it was like, to have the experience before she died. She was definitely going to die, everybody knew that. The doctors, their parents, everyone knew. And Margie told Stan she didn’t want to curl up in her grave without ever knowing the pleasures of a man inside her flesh.
Despite all Stan’s attempts at interesting his football buddies in Margie, none of them showed the least willingness. So finally, he agreed to it.
One night when their parents were at a party, he’d gone into her bedroom, switched off the lights, and slipped in beside her. He touched her small pink nipples; he sucked on them for a while, then showed her how to touch him. She’d been very eager to try everything he
knew, which wasn’t a hell of a lot. But when he rolled off her and lay on the sheets beside her, she began to weep. She sobbed and sobbed and wouldn’t stop no matter what he said or did.
He dressed and left the room, made himself a sandwich and ate it, had some milk, watched a few minutes of TV, and when he went back, she was still crying. So he hit her. Not hard. A slap on the face to wake her. ’Cause he’d seen it in a movie, a man breaking through the hysteria of his girlfriend. Just a slap.
It worked. Margie stopped bawling and looked at Stan.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. We shouldn’t have done it. It’s unnatural.”
“That’s not why I’m crying, Stan.”
“It’s not?”
“You really don’t know, do you?”
“Is it because you’re going to die and you’re not going to be able to enjoy sex anymore?”
“That’s not it, either,” she said.
“No?”
“I’m crying because my first and only sexual experience was with someone so incredibly clumsy.”
Stan just stood there and looked at his sister. He stared at her withered legs, her frail naked body on the sheets. All these years later, he could still picture the moment perfectly, remember exactly how he felt. The room turned to white fire. He heard pops behind his eyes, little crackling explosions, as if his brain were disintegrating.
Stan wanted to murder her right then, right there. He wanted to put his hands around her throat and break everything his fingers could find. All the little bones, vessels, and veins. He wanted to squeeze the breath from her, watch her eyes roll back.
That was the moment he first knew he had an evil
heart. When he understood that reading about crime was more than a hobby. He’d been drawn to it because he was inherently corrupt. Crime was his true religion. It was what he had instead of praying to God and singing hymns. Reading about all those twisted perverts from the past, the gunslingers and bootleggers and kidnappers, was for Stan as inspirational as a normal person reading about saints and holy men.
That night, staring down at his sneering sister, he’d realized with sudden and absolute knowledge that there was no crime, no sin under the sun he wasn’t willing to commit.
“He still back there?” Emma asked.
“Yeah,” said Norman. “Still there.”
“Has he been back there the whole time?”
“Yeah.”
“Ever since Miami? Eighteen hours he’s been back there?”
“That’s right.”
“Jesus, Norman, and you just now got around to mentioning it.”
Emma stared out her window at the dark, boring landscape. Pine forests and scrubland.
“Well, hell, Jennifer, I guess your boyfriend must like you after all. At least he likes you enough to tag along for six hundred miles anyway. Or maybe he wants to kill you. Keep you from turning him in, testifying against him. Maybe it’s not love at all.”
“Why don’t you try to shake him, Emma? It wouldn’t be that hard.”
“What kind of car is that he’s driving?”
“A Ford.”
“Does it have air conditioning?”
Jennifer said yes, it had air.
“Well, goddamn. You mean to tell me while we’ve been suffering up here in the heat, eighteen goddamn hours, and he’s back there with cold air blowing in his face? Doesn’t that make you mad, Jennifer? The selfishness of it? The stark injustice?”
“I guess so.”
“Well, it should. It makes me mad. And I’m sure it makes Norman mad. Doesn’t it, Norman? You’re angry at how selfish old lover boy is being, aren’t you?”
“Whatever you say, Emma.”
Jennifer was quiet for a mile or two; then she reached over in the dark and found Emma’s hand and gave it another secret squeeze.
“You like my hair, Emma? The cut, I mean? It’s new. I did it special for Stan. We were going to Santa Fe or Taos, one of those places, and buy an adobe hut, live close to the land, in harmony with nature and the universal cycles. So I told Sheri, my hairdresser, what the hell, she should just cut off a whole bunch, give me a fresh look for our new start in life. And then Stan, he looked at me and didn’t even notice. He didn’t say a kind word about it or anything.”
“Men,” Emma said.
“Yeah,” said Jennifer. “If they didn’t have penises, they wouldn’t know their fronts from their backs.”
Emma chuckled.
“Hey, Norman. This girl’s funny. And smart, too. Don’t you think?”
Norman stared out at the dark highway and said nothing.
“Pull over, Norman. Right here, pull onto the shoulder and turn off your lights. Let’s see what lover boy does.”
Norman slowed the truck and wheeled them onto the shoulder.
Emma swiveled around and stared back into the dark. The white Ford was fifty yards back, parked along the
shoulder with its lights off.
“Come on, Jennifer. Get out.”
“What?”
“We’re going back and say hi to lover boy. See how tough he really is.”
Stan didn’t see them coming till they appeared out of the gloom ten feet in front of the Galaxy.
“Holy shit!”
He switched on the headlights, punched the brights, but they didn’t even flinch, just kept walking. A small blond woman with whitish eyes and Jennifer, walking with that sexy sway she had. Both of them carrying automatic weapons.
Stan lunged for Lawton’s .38 on the passenger seat, but he knocked the fucking thing on the floorboard and had to unlock himself from his seat belt before he could squirm over and get it.
When he was upright again, a cold barrel jabbed into his neck.
“Put the gun on the seat,” the woman said.
“Jennifer?”
“Yes, Stan. I’m here.”
She was at the passenger window, aiming an assault rifle at him. Thing was so big and heavy, she was stooped over from cradling it.
“Put your dinky gun down on the seat,” the other woman said. “I don’t want to have to shoot you and mess up the upholstery with a lot of gore and gristle.”
Stan dropped the pistol on the passenger seat and Jennifer reached in and picked it up.
“That’s good. Now turn the headlights off and get out of the car. And don’t even think of trying to make a run for it.”
A car came whizzing out of the dark, lighting them
up, then roaring away in the same direction they were headed. But if anybody saw the assault rifle, they didn’t slow down.
“I got a fucking broken leg,” Stan said. “I’m not running anywhere.”
“So get out of the fucking car, macho man.”
Stan did as he was told, dragging his heavy plaster cast out the door. And the girl ordered him to turn around and walk to the other side of the car, over toward a ditch.
“Jesus Christ, Jennifer, are you going to let this woman shoot me?”
“You know what I found out, Stan? You know what I learned these last few hundred miles? I discovered a common household cockroach is a better lover than you are. That’s what I discovered.”
“A roach?”
“That’s right. A common household pest.”
“Jesus, have you been drinking? They slip you some drugs, or what?”
“I’ve come to my senses, Stan. I see which side my bread is buttered on. It took me awhile, but I finally realized it. You’re a man, and you’ve spent your whole life learning how to be something that’s very sick and twisted. And even if you started right now, you’re never going to get over it.”
“Give him hell, Jen.”
“I’m sorry, Stan. It isn’t going to work out between us. I’m involved with someone else.”
“You are? Since when?”
“Enough of this shit,” Emma said. “Stand back out of the way, Jen. You don’t want to mess up that nice silk blouse.”
Stan said, “Wait a minute. Let’s talk about this. You can’t just walk up to a man and kill him on the side of the road without any provocation whatsoever. It isn’t done.
That’s not how it works.”
“Oh, no?”
There was a loud crack, and Stan felt a jolt in his back. He went sprawling forward like somebody had blindsided him with an illegal block. One of those cheap shots that started bench-clearing brawls. People pouring down from the stands to get in a few licks, coaches running onto the field, trying to separate everyone. That’s what it felt like. A wallop to his spine, numbing and hard, and it made him mad.
But he couldn’t do anything with that anger because his face was in the dewy grass and he was numb. And he knew they’d have to bring out the stretcher for him on this one. The golf cart and the stretcher and take him off to the hospital and lay him down on the clean sheets, where he’d wake hours later not remembering any of it, amnesiac, and there would be a couple of his teammates, all showered and dressed, and their girlfriends, and there’d be some of the cheerleaders, too, with expectant smiles.
“Hey, he’s waking up. He’s waking. Can you hear us, Stan?”
And he’d smile because there was that one cheerleader. Alexandra Collins. The best-looking damn girl in school. And smart, too, and funny, but with a sad side. Like Stan had. A sad and quiet part of her that was the thing that drove Stan crazy about her. He wanted a girl he could confess to. A girl he could tell about Margie, what they’d done together, and his feelings of inadequacy, a girl who’d share her own secrets, and they’d be close because of that. So close they could say anything at all to each other.
His face was in the dewy grass, and she was there at his bedside when he woke. Alexandra Collins.
“Is he dead?”
“No, he’s still breathing.”
“Then you do the honors, Jen.”
“Oh, Christ, Emma. No, I can’t.”
“You have to, Jen. You don’t have a choice.”
“Emma, please.”
“Come on, sweetheart. We’re all in this together now. It’s a joint venture.”
Stan heard Jennifer whine; then a long while went by, Stan breathing in the scent of the wet grass.
Then he felt another jolt in his back. No pain, though. None at all, just a golden radiance expanding in his head. A silence deeper and more pure than any he’d ever known.
Gathered around his bed in the hospital were his other high school buddies. His teammates. All those guys. What were their names? He couldn’t remember. He couldn’t remember their girlfriends, either. He couldn’t even remember his own sweetheart’s name. Jesus, his best friends in the whole world and he couldn’t remember their fucking names. Not even his own girlfriend, the girl he wanted to marry. Man, what the hell was wrong with him, he couldn’t remember that wonderful girl’s name?
And then Stan couldn’t remember anything.
There was just the dew.